Hardware Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black Review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/02/western-digital-2tb-caviar-black-review/1

While SSDs might be the hot topic in storage this year, Western Digital remains focussed on HDDs, with the new 2TB Caviar Black it's new top end model. With four 500GB platters and a spindle speed of 7,200RPM, does the Caviar Black show there's life in HDDs yet? We find out.

 

What about the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB??
From what I can tell it should be able to beat this hard-drive overall.

 

I'm really sorry, but this sort of throws me when I'm reading through the article. Use MS Word right before you publish?

From the review, I see that the current generation of 7200rpm drives have basically made the VelociRaptor a bit irrelevant. My poor baby

 

Cheers for the spot - not sure how that made it through!

Sadly yes, the 300GB VelociRaptor doesn't look too clever these days.

I'm working on the 1.5TB F3 review as we speak - review next week!

 

On the last 1GB you mean 1TB right?

 

First page - cache size... is that a typo? Because a cache size of 642MB is really impressive!

 

64MB is the the correct cache

Indeed, it appears the edit fairies have been sleeping today! Either that or I'm just rubbish.

 

Honestly, to compare SSD's to Traditional hard drives is stupid, pointless at best. Literally it's like comparing a Corvette or Ferrari to a 1-ton Pickup Truck.

 

Thank you, that's exactly what I came here to say!

Who is going to buy one of these 2TB at that price?

Please review the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB instead.

If you don't have a review model yet then buy one! They are only £51 at Aria.

Also the 1.5TB F2 is only £61. If it's just used for storage the extra speed of the F3 won't be needed and the F2 should be quieter.

Cheers guys.

 

But using your analogy the 1-ton Pickup Truck is being marketed as a supercar in the performance stakes! Omitting the results would give the casual reader an incomplete view and would make this drive look like it has amazing performance to beat everything else on the market.

 

I should have gone to Specsavers

Please compare it to the F2 for sound levels if possible as that is more important than speed for a storage drive in a quiet PC.

Thanks

 

been using the 500 gb and 1 tb blacks in builds and love them. would love to see a review of the f3. surprised this drive came in noisy, as the others i have used seem very well mannered...

 

I take it nobody in the bit-tech offices does any large amount HD video editing, where a fast 2TB drive is a much better proposition than a screaming-fast-but-equally-expensive-and-tiny-capacity SSD. While SSD may be part of the future, I'm not holding my breath for a 2TB SSD, let alone waiting for one to sell for under $300/£230. Sometimes, in the pursuit of speed, it seems people lose sight of the overall picture.

 

Well that isn't far fetched as IRL, there were a few high performance trucks on the market a couple years back.

 

All those waiting on the Spinpoint F3....I may have some bad news for you...

 

Bad news - like its not worth the money or you broke it and can't finish the review

 

It still works and the review will still be going live next week, but those who think it'll be able to rival the WD 2TB Black are going to be surprised.

**EDIT**Or I could have been accidentally testing the 5400 RPM EcoGreen instead and not realised i'd plugged in the wrong drive...whoops. Rest easy Samsung fans!

 

These are potentially useful to me because I occasionally have the need to store 200MB/sec video streams.

They're still expensive, though, so I'll be looking at 1TB versions for the forseeable. Beyond that SSD may begin to compete.

 

I've been impatient and bought the F3..... I hope you're right

 

A fair point, but for the money of this drive wouldn't you be better off doing your editing on the SDD, and then simply shipping the finished file onto a cheap HDD for storage? Although I'm one of those people who don't do any HD video editing - so I admit I'm only guessing - but surely even 2hr+ 1080p HD files are going to be sub-40GB?

A good review, but this does seem to be an incredibly niche product - sandwiched as it is between vastly superior performance at one end, and vastly cheaper storage, (for not much of a performance hit) at the other.

Like most people here, I'm a big fan of the Spinpoint series' mix of speed, low noise and low cost, (and have been since the 80GB drives) so will look forward to that...